Return of Labourers and their Families removed from
Agricultural to Manufacturing districts
Extracts from a House of Commons Paper 13 May 1843

Copies of original letters to Edwin Chadwick Esq., Secretary to the Poor Law Commission from Robert Hyde Greg dated Manchester September 17th 1834 and Henry Ashworth Esq., dated Turton near Bolton February 15th 1835.

The letter from Robert Greg is not copied to this report, but that from Henry Ashworth goes on at length to quote many reasons why currently destitute families in the south of England, after careful selection, would benefit both their Poor Law Guardians and their communities by being given employment in the Manufacturing towns which were finding it almost impossible to find enough men, women and children to fill their ever-expanding factories, by means of a Registry [sic] Office to be set up in London:

“There can be no doubt that it would be a great advantage to these unfortunate poor, if they were induced to improve their condition by emigration instead of remaining where they are enduring great privations and being a serious burden upon the industry of their neighbours. I may with safety state, by way of encouragement to them that there is in this neighbourhood a greater scarcity of work-people than I have ever known, and this fact was never more universally acknowledged, not only in those engaged in manufactures, but by others also in almost every branch of trade”

He wanted this Registry to discriminate between untaught hands and the reckless and indolent, who because of distress were ready to seize any offer. He then goes on to say that since the old laws of settlement no longer appertained under the new Poor Law that migration may be something the Poor Law Commissioners might be prepared to consider.

He continues to provide examples of the unprecedented expansion of industry in the north:

“About forty years ago, the village of Staley Bridge, seven miles from Manchester was the residence of about 1,000 persons. It has now become a market town containing 15,000 inhabitants. This immense increase has chiefly been made up by people coming from the surrounding parts of Cheshire, Derbyshire and Yorkshire and from the poorest hand-loom weaving districts of this country. The Irish have latterly become very numerous there as well as in other places and it is supposed that upwards of 4,000 of them reside in and near the town. They have a Catholic chapel with two ministers and a congregation of upwards of 2,000 persons.”

“Within the same period the population of the adjoining townships of Hyde and Newton have also increased; the former from 800 to 10,000 and the latter from 500 to 8,000, and I am informed that the manufactories now in the course of erection in this neighbourhood alone will require a further supply of 5,000 people.”

“In taking a review of these extraordinary changes, it would not have appeared surprising if some occasional inconvenience or distress had occurred from so large a mass of unselected people having been brought suddenly together by the attractive demands of a newly established branch of trade. I am happy to say that I have never heard of the existence of any sort of privation or distress amongst them, except what has been occasioned by their strikes on account of wages.” (words in bold are my emphasis)

The Poor Law Commissioners, convinced by these and other arguments set up a system of migration which started at the end of 1835 up until the spring of 1837, entirely under the management a Mr Muggeridge from Manchester and Mr Baker from Leeds. Most of the documentation was lost but the following are the names of people sent to work at Factories in Stalybridge and Hyde extracted from the twenty one pages which survived. The majority of people were transported to the north by canal. I hope someone finds a long lost stray.